I think the bare bones of the narrative may be authentic, but that subsequent versions have refined, expanded and glossed them.
And I find myself asking whether it matters. What we have here, persuasively and movingly in my opinion – else I should not have put myself to the labour of translating the work – is a remarkable portrait of one of the greatest, and certainly the unhappiest, of Roman emperors. In the end, I say to myself, fiction – if this is fiction – may offer truths to which neither biography nor even autobiography can aspire. Who knows himself or another man as thoroughly as the artist may imagine a life? Whose identity is fixed? A great and malignant artist, Tacitus, pinned a terrible portrait of Tiberius on the wall of history. If another hand has been moved to amend that picture, so be it. It was Napoleon, with his uncanny penetration of men's motives, who dismissed the great historian as le poete; yet Tacitus' lying truth held sway for centuries. The author of this autobiography, whoever he may be, is, I would claim, a poet himself at moments, and I trust that his version of the story, a version which is certainly the case for the defence, will work its influence also. Tiberius has waited long for justice; perhaps it is time that the deceptive bargain offered him by the divine boy in the garden, who promised the aged emperor peace of mind in exchange for the sacrifice of his reputation, should be expunged.
So I do not care whether these memoirs are authentic or not. They convince me that they contain important verities. Basta! I had written this and left it to rest a week or two, to see if there was anything I wished to add.
No sooner had I concluded that I was satisfied, than I received a telephone call. I recognised the voice at once. It was the Count. He reminded me of a bargain we had not made: that he should receive seventy-five per cent of translation rights, and twenty per cent of my English royalties. When I told him I had no memory of this, and had anyway thought him dead, he laughed.
'I have given Tiberius to drink of my elixir,' he said. 'Why should you suppose that either he or I can die?'
I had no answer to that. He promises to appear at the publication party. We shall see. Book One
Chapter One
That I relish dryness is not strange: I have campaigned too many years in the rains of the Rhine and Danube valleys. I have marched miles, ankle-deep, through mud, and slept in tents soaked through by morning. Yet my relish for what is dry is of another nature: I detest sentiment or displays of feeling; I detest acting. I detest self- indulgence, and that emotion in which one eye does not weep but observes the effect of tears on those who watch. I take pleasure in language which is precise, hard and cruel. This has made me a difficult and uncomfortable person. My presence makes my stepfather, the Princeps, uneasy. I have known this since I was a youth. For years I regretted it, for I sought his approval, even perhaps his love. Then I realised I could never have either of these: he responded to the false spontaneous charm of Marcellus, as he does now to that of his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius, who are also my stepsons.
Nothing has been easy for me, and it would not be surprising if I were to relapse into self-pity. It is a temptation, because my merits have ever been unjustly disregarded on account of my lack of charm. I have never been able to dispel clouds with a smile and a jest, and it is natural if I have experienced twinges of envy when I see my inferiors able to do so. Yet I am kept from self-pity by my pride. This is inherited. It is Claudian pride. Augustus has always been rendered uneasy on account of the indignity of his birth. It is only by the accident of marriage that he has had a career; the accident of two marriages, I should say, for there can be no question that his own marriage to my mother smoothed his path to power. It was, however, the marriage of his grandfather, M. Atius Balbus, to Julia, the sister of Gaius Julius Caesar, the future dictator, which raised his family from an obscure provincial station. The Princeps' own father was the first member of the family to enter the Senate. Contrast that with my heredity.
I shall not boast of the Claudian gens: our achievements glitter on every page of the Republic's history.
Mark Antony – a liar of course – used to delight in mocking my stepfather's antecedents. He would claim that the great-grandfather of his colleague in the triumvirate had been a freed-man and rope-maker, and his grandfather a dishonest money-changer. It is not necessary to believe such charges to understand why Augustus' attitude to the old aristocracy of Rome has been ambiguous: he is both resentful and dazzled.
I, being a Claudian, judge these things better. I know the worthlessness of my fellow nobles. I recognise that their decadence has made them unfit to govern, and so destroyed Liberty in Rome. Though the Roman Empire now extends over the whole civilised world to the limits of the Parthian Empire in the East, our great days are behind us; we have been compelled to acquiesce in the suppression of Liberty. I write this in retreat in Rhodes, in the tranquillity of my villa overlooking the sea. My life is now devoted to the study of philosophy and mathematics, and to pondering the nature of experience. Accordingly it is not surprising that I should think to write my autobiography. There is good precedent for this, and any man of enquiring intelligence must frequently stand amazed before the spectacle of his own life and wish to make sense of it.
I am forty-two years old. My public life is ended through circumstances and my own desire. I have been humiliated in my private life. I am disgraced through no fault of my own, rather on account of the schemes of others and my own indifference. I may, if the Gods will it, have as long to live again, though nightly I pray otherwise. Even from this distance I cannot contemplate the shipwreck of old age with equanimity. My father was Tiberius Claudius Nero, dead now for more than thirty years. (I was nine when he died. They made me deliver his funeral oration. More of that later, if I can bring myself to write it.) My mother, who still lives, is Livia Drusilla. She was seduced by the triumvir, Caesar Octavianus, who is now styled Augustus. He was not deterred by the fact that she was pregnant. My brother, Drusus, was born three days after their marriage. He knew no father but Augustus, and our real father refused to receive him: he liked to pretend that Drusus was not his son. This was nonsense. Perhaps it salved his pride. I used to go to stay with him on the estate in the Sabine Hills to which he had retired. I wish I could claim vivid memories. But I have few, except of meals. He comforted himself with gluttony; his dinner lasted the whole afternoon. He liked me, even when I was only six or seven, to drink wine with him. 'Don't water it,' he said, 'it delays the effect…'
As the sun set he would embark on long monologues, to which I scarcely listened and which I could not anyhow have understood.
He was an unlucky man, of poor judgment and some sense of honour. Fortune having dishonoured him, he sought refuge from the regrets which assailed him in eating and drinking. As the years have slipped away, I have come to understand him; and to sympathise.
'Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?' he would sigh, raising a cup of wine; and a tear would trickle down his fat cheek. A few years ago my father started to appear in my dreams. I would see him standing on a promontory looking out to sea. He was watching for a sail. I gazed at the blue water too, but did not dare to approach him. Then the sun was darkened, as if in an eclipse, and when light returned my father had vanished; in his place stood a white cockerel bleeding from the neck. This dream came to me, in identical form, perhaps seven times. At last I consulted Thrasyllus but even he, the most acute interpreter of dreams, was unable to supply an explanation.
Or perhaps dared not. In my position few, even among trusted friends, have the courage to speak their minds. Drusus, as I say, was never allowed to visit our father. Indeed I do not think he ever thought of him, except when I compelled the subject. But then he had no memories, and Drusus was never introspective. I, on the other hand, can recall my father on his knees clutching my mother's ankles and sobbing out his love for her. She disengaged her legs: he fell prostrate on marble; and I began to howl. I was three at the time. I adored my mother for her beauty, and for being herself. She would sing me to sleep with honied voice; the touch of her fingers on my eyelids fell like rose petals. She would tell me stories of my ancestors and of the gods, of Troy and of Orpheus, and the wanderings of my forefather Aeneas. At the age of five I wept for Dido, Queen of Carthage, and she said: 'You are wrong to weep. Aeneas was fulfilling his destiny.' 'Is destiny so grim, Mama?' 'Go to sleep, child.' Drusus would clamber all over our stepfather who would kiss him and throw him in the air and laugh at his whoops. But I kept my distance. My love was for Mama, whose favourite I knew myself to be. That was important to me, and it confirmed me in what may have been an instinctive conviction that the world is ignorant of justice: for I knew Drusus to have a charm that I lacked, and, moreover, I recognised in him a sunny virtue which was absent from my character. His temper was benign. Nothing alarmed him. He was always truthful and generous. Even as a baby
